Waymo driverless rides are coming to Los Angeles

Autonomous ride-hailing company Waymo, a division of Google's parent company Alphabet, Inc., announced Wednesday that Los Angeles will be its "next ride-hailing city." So Angelenos will soon notice Waymo's eye-catching, gadget-heavy driverless cars on LA roads as the company eyes offering its services in as many parts of the Los Angeles area as are feasible.

Waymo says in its press release that it will "deploy a round-the-clock service that provides more accessible and dependable mobility options to all residents of LA – whether they’re carpooling to work along Pico, catching a ride to the nearest Metro stop, meeting up with friends at The Broad, or taking the kids to Dodger Stadium."

The specificity in the release is bold and hints at the expectation of an uphill battle to earn the trust of residents. As any Angeleno who has driven their kids through Echo Park to Dodgers Stadium on game day can attest, navigating the streets of LA is not something locals will instinctively want to trust to driverless cars.

By operating in Los Angeles County, Waymo joins its competitor Motional, an autonomous car project created jointly by Aptiv and Hyundai, which partnered with Uber Eats to perform limited driverless food deliveries in Santa Monica starting in May of this year.

Los Angeles follows Phoenix and San Francisco in Waymo's U.S. expansion plan, and those two other big Waymo cities offer a glimpse of what's in store for Los Angeles in the months and years ahead. For instance, earlier this year, Waymo began offering ride-hailing services between Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport and downtown Phoenix — a big step. But the program is still in its infancy after years of research and planning. You have to be part of a group known within Waymo as "trusted testers" to get one of these rides.

As of 2018, all Waymo users in Phoenix had to sign nondisclosure agreements to ride, according to the tech publication Futurism. And while this is presumably still the case with "trusted testers," Waymo rides are now available to some regular customers. Riders in the Phoenix area have to start and end their routes in a small service area that includes the suburbs of Chandler, Tempe, Mesa, and Gilbert, Arizona. This tiny market in which the service is apparently ready for prime time is the product of a program that started in the Phoenix area back in 2016.

So if the past is any indication, Los Angeles should expect Waymo to roll out bit-by-bit over the course of years.

Though, according to Waymo's recent press release, "Everything we’ve learned over 12 years of autonomous driving has prepared us to serve Angelenos." Waymo also notes that its vehicles have "autonomously driven millions of miles on freeways, giving us a head start handling some of Los Angeles’s most challenging roads."

But challenges or not, Waymo does not appear to view its Los Angeles expansion as another opportunity to gather mountains of data and log millions more road miles. It seems, rather, to be asserting itself as bona fide, commercially viable ride-hailing business. "With approximately 13 million residents, the Los Angeles metropolitan area is one of the largest ride-hailing service areas in the world and the third largest in the U.S., with an estimated market opportunity of $2 billion in 2022," reads Waymo's press release.

"As a commercial opportunity, Los Angeles is the equivalent of a dozen smaller U.S. ride-hailing market opportunities combined."

So, who knows? If you're dreaming of an autonomous ride to, say, the 2023 World Series at Dodger Stadium, making that a reality might prove to be more of a heavy lift for the Dodgers themselves than for Waymo.